Author: Wayne Unger, Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University

The city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was shaken by revelations in December 2023 that two local teenage boys shared hundreds of nude images of girls in their community over a private chat on the social chat platform Discord. Witnesses said the photos easily could have been mistaken for real ones, but they were fake. The boys had used an artificial intelligence tool to superimpose real photos of girls’ faces onto sexually explicit images. With troves of real photos available on social media platforms, and AI tools becoming more accessible across the web, similar incidents have played out across the country, from…